I agree that the epistemic status of experience is important, but… First of all does anyone actually disagree with concrete things that Dennett says? That people are often wrong about their experiences is obviously true. If that was the core disagreement, it would be easy to persuade people. The only persistent disagreement seems to be about whether there is something additional to the physical explanation of experience (hence the zombies argument) or whether fundamental consciousness is even coherent concept at all—just replacing absolute certainty with uncertainty wouldn’t solve it, when you can’t even communicate what’s your evidence is.
The disagreement is about whether qualia exist enough to need explaining. A rainbow is ultimately explained as a kind of illusion, but to arrive at the explanation , you have to accept that they appear to exist, that people aren’t lying about them.
Dennett doesn’t just think you can be wrong about what’s going on in your mind, he thinks qualia don’t exist at all, and that he is zombie … but his opponents don’t all think that qualia are fundamental, indefinable, non physical etc. It’s important to remember that the camp #2 argument given here is very exagerated.
Yes; there are definitely people who disagree with most things Dennett says, including how exactly you can be wrong about your experience. Don’t really want to get into the details here since that’s not part of the post.
I agree that the epistemic status of experience is important, but… First of all does anyone actually disagree with concrete things that Dennett says? That people are often wrong about their experiences is obviously true. If that was the core disagreement, it would be easy to persuade people. The only persistent disagreement seems to be about whether there is something additional to the physical explanation of experience (hence the zombies argument) or whether fundamental consciousness is even coherent concept at all—just replacing absolute certainty with uncertainty wouldn’t solve it, when you can’t even communicate what’s your evidence is.
The disagreement is about whether qualia exist enough to need explaining. A rainbow is ultimately explained as a kind of illusion, but to arrive at the explanation , you have to accept that they appear to exist, that people aren’t lying about them.
Dennett doesn’t just think you can be wrong about what’s going on in your mind, he thinks qualia don’t exist at all, and that he is zombie … but his opponents don’t all think that qualia are fundamental, indefinable, non physical etc. It’s important to remember that the camp #2 argument given here is very exagerated.
Yes; there are definitely people who disagree with most things Dennett says, including how exactly you can be wrong about your experience. Don’t really want to get into the details here since that’s not part of the post.